100,000 People at the Dempsey-Carpentier Fight, 1921: a Remarkable Photograph

This was a remarkable photograph for the information it presented when it was published in The Illustrated London News on 30 July 1921. That's a real sea of humanity surrounding the canvas ring, and probably the largest crowd ever assembled in Jersey City.

The image was made by a photographer for The New York Times from an airplane about 2,000 feet over the arena.

The fight between the two men was billed as "The Fight of the Century", and it was, up until that time. It was probably the event that was most-listened to than any other event in history, the early radio broadcast of the fight reaching at least 300,000. But since there were so many mass venues listening to the fight--or watching its progress via displayed messages transcribed from the radio broadcast--it is really pretty impossible to say how many followed the event on that day.

(The image below shows a very large crowd of approximately 10,000 in Times Square waiting for the returns f the fight.)

Comments

I had never heard of Georges Carpentier until I read this post. I guess it speaks to the temporal nature of fame.

The pictures are absolutely amazing.

What I have found more fascinating is that Carpentier survived the bloodbath of the first world war. He served as a pilot in the French military during the first world war and was awarded the Croix de Guerre and the Médaille Militaire.

I pass Manassa every time I go to New Mexico. It's off the road down to Taos and Santa Fe. But I've never made my pilgrimage to the Jack Dempsey Museum. Maybe next time. Jasper's comment about Carpentier surviving WWI brought back a certain feeling I get from reading about that time. I think it was first colored by the Shackleton story, of their incredible survival at the end of the earth only to return to the frenzy of WWI and, for a few, the death they had avoided against impossible odds. Surviving must put an aura around your days. I had a similar feeling reading some of M.F.K. Fisher's writings about being in France after WWII ... five years or so after. Life was still stunned, like the silence after an explosion. But I digress. I read where Dempsey died in Southampton, NY, and so I hope that means he did well to the end.